First of all, I would like to thank everyone that’s been taking part in these games. You guys have become like a family of sorts, in a very Reality TV Show sort of way. Mafia on this site has burgeoned to the point where these games are becoming more and more competitive, and we have caught the attention of other Mafia communities with our play.
That said, we just recently held our 18th game here. While it was interesting, and Synonym did run train on everyone else, we did have a lot of problems. To name a few:
–Formatting inconsistencies between mobile and desktop users, which prevented post formatting to work at all on mobile. Needing votes to be bolded to stick out, this caused me several issues with counting votes during this game.
–Mobile users being completely unable to quote posts at all, causing a massive amount of confusion as to who was being referenced, what post was being referenced, and why.
–An edit being committed on accident due to these errors by RadicalFuzz
–PM conversations listing only the amount of people, and not names at the top, making PM conversations unidentifiable. Vynce almost blew the whole game by posting something in a game night PM, thinking it was the Loser’s Lounge because they both had the same amount of people and were both being posted in. This wouldn’t be a problem if Pimp Willy and ForgeDigger weren’t in the game night PM and still alive in the Mafia game.
–Instances of server errors and even a couple of periods where posting or even accessing PMs were not possible at all at the start of the game, and even caused me some problems during Pre-Game while trying to assign roles.
Now, this isn’t to come down on SRK, but mainly Vanilla-hosted Forums as a whole. Mr. Wizard has stated that this is a global issue with Vanilla-hosted Forums, and is being caused by changes upstream. Vanilla is not working on these problems, and they will persist for God knows how long, if they ever fix them (we still have many of the same issues from the start of the changeover still prevalent.)
Because of this, I began throwing around the idea of a new site to a few people, namely, PW, Alpha, Vynce, Synonym, and Forge. Forge has already run mafia on her own Forum before, as a small game for some of her and Fuzz’s friends and a few SRKers to play in. But being a freehost forum, it is not without its limitations, namely, no mobile version to speak of.
So I propose this, we could attempt to attain a domain and hosting for our own forum, and run games there. If you have seen bits and bobbles about JesusToastMafia.com, this is what I’m referring to, and thus, that is the name I’m proposing for the forum.
There would be of course some benefits to doing so:
-The ability to custom tailor the forum for playing mafia. That could include countdown timers for the end of phases, integrate the leaderboard into the site, making updating a semi-automated process, prevent editing of posts for players, creating a program for gathering player votes, limiting PM access for players to only PM the GM during a game, etc. Whatever we deem necessary, we could wire into it.
-The ability to use Tapatalk on the forums, clearing up the majority of mobile issues.
-The ability to streamline Loser’s Lounges and Mafia conversations, making it hard to screw up (Yeah, look at me on that one, guys. Fuck you, I’m brilliant.)
-Further legitimizes our mafia endeavors, where we can talk about what’s going on with the game, and put our flavor of mafia out there in a much easier to see light. This could also be integrated with streams of our Skype mafia games that are going to start up.
These are a handful of the benefits that come from the move. It does however, pose questions, I’m sure more will come as this thread goes on. Here’s some that are already posed:
Cost? With the hosting service I had looked into, SiteGround, domain registration is free, and their basic webhosting (which should be sufficient for our needs) is $4/month. (US Dollar)
**How would we fund this? ** This is something we would need to discuss. If it’s not feasible for us to figure out a way to put a few bucks into this a month, then it’s not worth it to discuss. I’m trying to figure out how I can put the money into it myself, and help with the funding. With China, that’s hard, but I’m planning on moving to Seoul starting in January, so that will make it easier, because we pasty white folk can actually get Visa cards over there and transfer to Paypal easily and shit.
What about players? What happens if our numbers start dwindling? This is something that will come down the line, I know. I’ve been thinking of this, but nothing’s surefire. I mean, one thing I’ve thought of is cross-posting sign-ups here on SRK. We could accept sign-ups here and ask that players register an account on JTM for the game thread. My concern with that is whether it would get flagged for spam. Another thing that could be done is we could possibly append a link to the site onto our EpicMafia profiles, so that when we play, our site gets advertised. I also keep loosely in touch with some of the mafia players in the Game of Champions. I may be able to get some to play a cross-site game on JTM.
There are ways, but we have to brainstorm. I believe this is the biggest detracting point to moving.
Who would take care of the technical aspects? This would end up being a slew of people. For starters, AlphaCommando is working on a potential logo for the site. ForgeDigger has already offered her help as she is knowledgeable in PHP, which will be the programming language the forums are written in. I have set up websites on pro hosts before, including forums, and ran admin work on many a forum, so that would be something I could help in, as well as the logistics for running the games. If we are able to make a vote count program, then that may have to be a collaborative effort, but there’s already Pimp Willy, pietastic, and ForgeDigger that have been able to write programs, so I’m sure that somewhere, we’d have that accounted for.
What forum software would we run potentially? I initially considered phpBB, but have been looking more into Simple Machines lately. It looks like it would be the best initially for our needs, and still extensible for whatever we need to add to it.
Now, feel free to ask questions, feel free to debate about this possibility. I welcome anyone that’s played mafia to have a voice in this matter, it will certainly help us figure out what’s best for Mafia here. Regardless of the choice, I’m happy that Mafia continues to live on here, and we’ll keep baking dat Jesus toast no matter what.
If you would like to vote Yay or Nay to moving, please do the best you can to announce your vote to me and I’ll keep a running tally on here. You can only vote on this if you have played at least one mafia game on SRK. This is why I didn’t make this a polled thread, too much potential for trolling. (You can change your votes.)
DISCUSS!
Yay (5): AlphaCommando, jasonC, Missing Person, RadicalFuzz, Vynce(?)
Nay (2): crucades, Pimp Willy
Undecided (6): Blindknagg, DukeC, ForgeDigger, Hecatom, XthAtGAm3RGuYX
